Advancement in robotics, autonomous transport, AI and machine learning could impact more than 5 million people’s jobs by 2020

Though more than 5 million people’s jobs are estimated to get impacted by technology advancement across verticals, some 2 million new highly-skilled jobs will be created by 2020, according to WEF’s latest ‘The Future of Jobs’ report’s findingsPankaj Maru | ETCIO | Updated: January 19, 2016, 17:30 IST

As technology continues to penetrate across sectors, there’s a growing fear among people across the world about their jobs and scope of employment in future.

That fear could become an alarming reality in near future going by the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s latest report released on Monday.

‘The Future of Jobs’, the WEF’s report estimates that over 5.1 million jobs globally will be lost during the period 2015-2020 mainly to technology advancements and disruptive changes in business models.

“A net employment impact of more than 5.1 million jobs lost to disruptive labour market changes over the period 2015–2020, with a total loss of 7.1 million jobs— two thirds of which are concentrated in the Office and Administrative job family—and a total gain of 2 million jobs, in several smaller job families,” report says.

In terms of disruptive impact during 2015-2020, Office and Administrative jobs will be highly impacted with a minus 4.91% change, followed by Manufacturing and Production jobs with a negative 1.63% drop.

While jobs in Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports and Media, Construction and Extraction, and Installation and Maintenance, see a negative change of –1.03,–0.93% and –0.15% respectively.

“Today, we are on the cusp of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. Developments in genetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D printing and biotechnology, to name just a few, are all building on and amplifying one another. This will lay the foundation for a revolution more comprehensive and all-encompassing than anything we have ever seen,” the report observes.

Interesting though, smart systems according to the report will help tackle problems ranging from supply chain management to climate change and also give rise to sharing economy and monetization for people with their homes and cars.

“While the impending change holds great promise, the patterns of consumption, production and employment created by it also pose major challenges requiring proactive adaptation by corporations, governments and individuals,” the report notes.

Given the technological advancement around, most industries are trying to adjust and employments are undergoing a fundamental transformation where by some jobs are likely to become redundant, some will see a faster growth while existing jobs will need new skills sets.

Though a huge number of jobs are expected to get churn out, the report indicates a high employment growth in the computer and mathematics related jobs that is beyond the technology sector as there’s growing usage of tools such as big dataanalytics and data visualization.

“The strongest employment growth in the sector is expected to come from a continued shift towards online shopping and the application of Big Data analytics to derive and act upon insights from customer data and preferences to provide a personalised shopping experience,” report finds.

Among the jobs lost, from gender impact perspective, male will lose 2.65 million jobs against women’s 2.45 million jobs. However, the ratio of jobs gained against lost favours males more than the females. For every three jobs lost, man will gain one new job while for female, its five jobs lost for one new job gain.

“Across all industries, unconscious bias among managers and lack of work-life balance are cited as the two top barriers to women’s workforce integration over the 2015–2020 period,” the report points out to gender discrimination and other issues faced by females.

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